Commercial television broadcasting has been supported by advertising revenue since its inception. More recently, providers of video programs and video clips in Internet sites have embedded advertising within video programs or next to video programs in web pages at which the video programs are viewed. However, a continuing problem involved in these technologies is that the advertisements are not closely personalized for the viewer. Instead, commercial broadcasters attempt to define, in terms of rough demographic characteristics, a sub-population of a mass audience that is expected to be interested in a particular program; advertisers who believe that their products appeal to the same rough demographic will purchase advertising slots in the program. Unfortunately, a continuing result of this system is that at least some viewers, who do not fit the rough demographic, are shown advertisements that are irrelevant to the viewers' interests.
Internet technologies also have attempted to tailor advertisements, displayed in World Wide Web sites, more closely to the preferences of Internet users, based on collecting explicitly-specified preference data, based on a user profile, or by inferring preferences through collecting metadata that is derived as the Internet user selects pages or performs online actions. However, these technologies are not fully accurate because they rely on algorithms that attempt to match known characteristics of ads with user preferences that can be only roughly inferred from the data that the users provide.
Additionally, viewers find advertisements that interrupt or obstruct the video program being watched as being disruptive, particularly when the advertisements are not of interest to the user.
The approaches described in this section are approaches that could be pursued, but not necessarily approaches that have been previously conceived or pursued. Therefore, unless otherwise indicated, it should not be assumed that any of the approaches described in this section qualify as prior art merely by virtue of their inclusion in this section.